Australia, New Zealand and Federation, 1883-1901 - Section C

This discusses New Zealand responses to the Australian federation movement.

II: NEW ZEALAND AND AUSTRALIAN
FEDERATION

New Zealand and Federation: A Case to Answer?

It is no surprise that six of the
radial roads in Australia's
capital city should be named after State capitals, but it seems confusing and
redundant that a seventh should be called "Canberra Avenue". The mystery is
compounded by the fact that this most Australian of names leads to an inner
suburb with the New Zealand
name (and characteristic pronunciation) of Manuka. In fact, Canberra Avenue was projected as Wellington Avenue.
As late as the planning of their federal capital in 1913, Australians assumed
that New Zealand
would one day become the seventh State of their Commonwealth.1

By
contrast, throughout the twentieth century it has been an article of faith on
the other side of the Tasman that New Zealand was destined to stand
aloof from the Australian federation. Until F.L.W. Wood initiated the
short-lived "plain nonsense" controversy in 1968, there was little
academic discussion of a cut-and-dried issue.2 Until Wood's
counter-attack, the subject seemed effectively summarised in an article by E.J.
Tapp, published in 1952, which argued that New Zealand had shown almost no
interest in projects for the federation of Australia for at least half a
century before 1900.3 Accepting Tapp's verdict, in 1955 Manning
Clark included in his massive collection of Australia historical documents a
lengthy extract from a speech by Captain W.R. Russell, one of the two delegates
to represent New Zealand at the 1890 Federation Conference in Melbourne. It
was unambiguously headed: "The
Reasons Why New Zealand Did Not Join the Australian Federation".4 A decade after Melbourne, Russell took an
active part in the New Zealand Royal Commission which was appointed in December
1900 (on the eve of the proclamation of the Australian Commonwealth) and
collected extensive evidence about New Zealand opinion between January and
March 1901.5 Its predictably damning conclusions influenced standard
histories. "The decision was
undoubtedly wise", pronounced A.J. Harrop in 1933. New Zealand representatives "would have
found little in common with those of Australia and could have exercised
little influence on policy. ... Any close political connection between the two
is extremely unlikely."6 Wood's jaunty revisionism was aimed at
a very solid target. Fundamentally, he demanded to know why arguments for
federation that had allegedly swayed Australians should have left New
Zealanders unmoved. The standard New Zealand
response came to be that there was no reason why Australian arguments should
influence New Zealand,
since the two countries were entirely different. But that was to confuse the
outcome, New Zealand's
refusal to take part, with the problem to be explained: why did the Kiwis
remain aloof?

Tapp
traced the divergence of identity back to the early decades of settlement. As
early as 1857, the governor of New Zealand,
Sir Thomas Gore Browne, had reported to London
that "a separate and independent power and destiny is fitting for this
Colony". A later governor, Sir William Jervois, reported in 1880 "a
general feeling" against any form of federation, which he attributed to
differences in climate and distance between New
Zealand and Australia. Furthermore, the federal
cause was weakened by divisions among its supporters, some wishing to create
"a legislative, others only a deliberative body".7
Indeed, New Zealand
soon drew back even from the latter option, in 1885 declining to affiliate to
the ineffectual Federal Council of Australasia. Reflecting the rapid shift of New Zealand exports towards Britain, John Ballance insisted that Britain would "always be willing to
provide" the only defence that New Zealand required, that of the
country's overseas commerce. The intellectual debate, such as it was, over
closer links with Australia was complicated by the professed enthusiasm of
politicians as influential as Vogel and Ballance for a federation of the entire
British empire, which was itself partly an expression of insecure colonial nationalism.8 Robert Stout commented that New Zealanders were
"afraid" of a trans-Tasman union for two "special reasons":
it would weaken local autonomy as well as reduce their influence as "the
trade centre" of the Pacific.9

Hence
the presence of Sir John Hall and Captain Russell in Melbourne
in 1890 amounted to little more than a watching brief for New Zealand interests. Indeed, it
was in support of an amendment to substitute "Australian" for
"Australasian" in the key resolution for federation that Russell
delivered his celebrated speech regretting that "to say absolutely that
the colony [New Zealand] would be prepared, at any rate for the next few years,
to merge its young manhood in the more mature life of the Australian Colonies
would be to lead the Conference to believe what I cannot hope". New Zealand, with 700,000 people, was evolving
"a distinct national type" thanks to a climate "dissimilar to a
very great extent from that of Australia"
which had, he added euphemistically, "been colonized in an entirely
different manner". Moreover, New Zealanders had endured "a very much
rougher time", facing not only "boisterous" weather but
"dense vegetation". The struggle to "carve our homes out of the
wilderness" had forced New Zealanders to practise "self-denial ... to
an extent of which the people of the Australian continent have no
conception".

Russell also advanced more specific arguments.
Australian politicians had "dealt with native races in a much more summary
manner than we have ventured to deal with ours in New Zealand". It was unlikely
that a federal parliament would provoke a renewal of outright warfare,
"but the advance of civilization would be enormously delayed" if
entrusted to a legislature ignorant of the issues. On the defence issue,
Russell doubted whether Australia
could do anything to protect its neighbour from a sudden naval attack, while a
federal army would be expensive and "of no use to us". Then again, New Zealand
was "essentially an exporting country" with a vested interest in free
trade. Victoria, New South
Wales and Queensland
were "united by natural circumstances" and would use their combined
population of 2.6 million to gang up on the weaker colonies and force them to
accept a protective tariff.10 This was certainly insightful in regard
to the Victorian campaign for federation, but it was something of an
exaggeration to include free-trading New South Wales.11

The
core assumption behind these various objections was that New Zealand and Australia were essentially
different. New Zealand
ignorance of Australian reality could easily be manipulated to widen that
assumption. Jervois in 1880 had attributed the fundamental New Zealand opposition to distance.
"Nature had made twelve hundred impediments to the inclusion of New Zealand in any such federation", Hall
told the Melbourne
conference, "in the twelve hundred miles of stormy ocean". The wave
of feeling that had swept Australians into federation, concluded Pember Reeves,
"was checked by a wide interval of ocean". In their monumental tome on
Australia's
new constitution, Quick and Garran acknowledged that the isolation caused by
twelve hundred miles of sea was "a factor which cannot be neglected,
though it may be exaggerated". They pinned their hopes on the Royal
Commission, which had just been announced, confident that it would force New
Zealanders for the first time to face the choice between "union and
isolation". The authors were to be disappointed: the Commissioners also
concluded that "the stretch of some twelve hundred miles of sea ... is a
weighty argument against New
Zealand joining the Commonwealth".12

Distance, however, was not the only weighty
argument that presented itself to the Commissioners. New Zealanders were not
interested in the subject. New
Zealand would sacrifice not merely its
legislative independence but lose £450,000 in annual revenue. The federal
constitution contained a compromise clause, proposed by the premier of Tasmania, that ensured
the allocation of three-quarters of all customs and excise revenue to the
States for a transitional period of ten years. The Royal Commission abandoned
all objectivity and indexed references to this clause as the "Braddon
Blot". It was the temporary nature of this arrangement that worried the
Commissioners. How would New
Zealand, as a State of the Commonwealth,
make up the shortfall in its income once the Braddon provisions lapsed?13
The controversy over the Braddon clause also divided Australians in their
response to federation. However, in New Zealand, the explicit fears of
retrenchment and taxation were underlined by a very specific local memory. The
constitution of 1852 had given New
Zealand quasi-federal institutions through
its provincial system. The provinces had largely depended upon revenue
allocated to them by the government. Faced with the costs of wars against
Maori, centralising politicians in Wellington
had dishonoured the convention, so condemning the weaker units to bankruptcy. New Zealand's
provinces had been swept away in 1876.14

The
Royal Commission was also ruthless in dismissing another of the stock arguments
for federation voiced in Australia.
The issue of political union for defence purposes simply did not arise. So long
as Britannia ruled the wave, New Zealanders could rely on imperial protection
of their own coastline. "In the event of Great
Britain losing command of the sea, Australia and New Zealand could not rely upon
being able to render material assistance to each other".15
Indeed, there were positive advantages in informal collaboration between
two distinct British colonies. The two
countries would certainly come to each other's aid in time of war (a sentiment
underlined, as Seddon himself pointed out, by the way in which each had rallied
to the support of the Empire's cause in South Africa in 1899).16 Australia's
proposed federal military college was a good idea, but New Zealand might seek
access to such a facility without a formal political link. Similarly, no
advantage was seen in the planned Commonwealth supreme court while a right of
appeal existed to the Privy Council in London.17 Forty years
earlier, Gore Browne had darkly hinted that an Australasian federation would
quickly become a republic under the Southern Cross. That same distrust of a
continent full of disloyal ex-convict radicals lurked in the minds of the
Commissioners. "Neither Australia
nor New Zealand
would be likely in future years under any circumstances to break away from the
Empire without inquiry as to the attitude of the other; time would be gained,
and a catastrophe probably averted."18

Obviously, the New Zealand debate, such as it was, on the
possibility of participation in Australian federation was carried on chiefly
for New Zealand ends and
within a New Zealand
context. The historian cannot simply regard it as a trans-Tasman control
experiment that can prove or discredit R.S. Parker's hypothesis of inconvenient
borders, or Helen Irving's appeal to the Utopian moment. Yet it may at least
give cause for reflection that stock arguments from the Australian movement for
federation seem to have been badly battered by the experience of crossing those
twelve hundred miles of storm-tossed sea.

Enter
F.L.W. Wood

In retrospect, it is obvious that the expansion of higher education in
the nineteen-sixties would encourage divergence in the study of Australian and New Zealand
history. The New Zealand Journal of
History was founded in 1966; the Melbourne
journal Historical Studies dropped
its sub-title Australia and New Zealand soon
afterwards. In History as in other disciplines, growth in Departments and
graduate programmes made New
Zealand universities more
self-sufficient. Yet in 1968, F.L.W. Wood's attempt to re-open the subject of New Zealand's relations with Australia would have seemed timely. De Gaulle's two vetoes on United
Kingdom attempts to join the Common Market amounted to little more than a
temporary reprieve for Britain's overseas farm. It was high time to re-examine New Zealand's
own position in the Asia-Pacific region.
In 1965, a Free Trade Agreement had been signed with Australia. Young New Zealanders
were looking across the Tasman for opportunities. Air travel was neutralising
the famous factor of distance. In January 1968, a contingent of the Australian
historians flew to Christchurch
to take part in ANZAAS, the congress of learned societies.1

If
in cold print, Wood's revisionism can be criticised for its declamation and
contradiction, it should be remembered that the paper was designed not as a
learned article but as a conference presentation. Moreover, Wood appreciated
something that is disappearing from the culture of modern higher education:
there is more to the historian's task than the compilation of research
monographs. He explicitly aimed his revision not simply at the New Zealand
aspect of the question, but at the wider issue of why federation occurred at
all. Three-quarters of the question, he insisted, had to be solved at the
Australian end.2 As it happened, his paper was published in the New Zealand Journal of History, and the
subsequent controversy focused on the twenty-five percent that he had sought to
relegate to secondary status.

F.L.W. Wood had been born in Australia in 1903, son of G.A. Wood, Professor
of History at Sydney University and a courageous critic of the Boer War.3
The son had studied at Oxford and returned to
lecture at Sydney before being appointed, in
1935, to the Chair of History in Wellington.
In an era when antipodean universities were under-funded and their staffs
over-worked, Wood was famously productive, publishing two histories of Australia,
as well as books interpreting his adopted country and tracing the development
of its external policy.4 In the year that ANZAAS came to
Christchurch he would turn 65. Who better to invite Australian visitors to help
re-examine a New Zealand
myth?

Wood
noted that just as New Zealanders were sure they had made the right decision in
1900, so most Australian historians had assumed that for them, federation was
"a logical development ... in the long run inevitable, certainly
desirable".5 Yet almost
twenty years earlier, the Parker-Blainey exchange had thrown some doubt on this
tryst with destiny, suggesting that federation resulted not so much from a
tidal wave of Australian nationalism as from a hard-headed recognition that
some colonial boundaries made no economic sense. Parker-Blainey was back in
vogue in the nineteen-sixties, and the causes of Australian federation seemed
increasingly to be found in a patchwork of local ambitions to create markets
for apples and flour.6 The notion that federation was a popular
movement was also looking less plausible. Turn-outs at the referendums in 1898
and 1899 rarely exceeded 60 percent of qualified voters, while the much-vaunted
"people's conference" at Corowa that had kick-restarted the movement
back in 1893 had been unmasked as an event cleverly manipulated by business
interests.7

Wood
sought to escape from the straitjacket of two opposed national orthodoxies, and
return instead to a world of seven colonies all subject to similar pressures
and incentives: "the basic question is not
why New Zealand stood aside, but why Australians, who had as many reasons as
New Zealanders to be cagey, nevertheless went ahead."8 Despite
this proclaimed inversion, in practice both Wood and his critics assumed that
the real problem for explanation was why New Zealand should have been out of
line. At the level of personalities, this may be seen in Wood's response to
J.A. La Nauze's "fascinating" biography of Victoria's Alfred Deakin, published in 1965.
La Nauze's Deakin is one of the great
biographies in Australian history. Indeed, it is possible that its greatness
constitutes its only flaw. La Nauze did not simply turn a colonial politician
into an Australian statesman, but managed to convert a complex operator into a
visionary soul. Across two volumes, the giant and sometimes spiritually
tormented Deakin never appears as a ward-heeler or wheeler-dealer. None the
less, La Nauze had portrayed Affable Alfred as a courageous leader, while New
Zealand's Richard John Seddon remained the manipulative and prosaic King Dick.9
If La Nauze's inspirational Deakin had swept the apathetic and hard-headed
Australian public portrayed in the Parker-Blainey debate into accepting
federation, why had not Seddon, with his awesome domination of New Zealand
politics, provided the same leadership to his people? This focus upon a Seddon
who was less than a Deakin led Wood close to contradiction. For all his regal
pretensions inside New
Zealand, King Dick "knew in his
heart" that he would be out-gunned by the Australian giants "and
preferred to settle for the secure domination of his own small backyard".
It seems hardly fair to belittle Seddon for not being Deakin and then to
censure him for recognising the reality himself. Similarly, it is confusing to
acknowledge that Seddon was "extremely skilful in sensing the way the wind
was blowing" while blaming him for failing to fan a federal breeze that
Wood believed was already gusting.10

The
Wood Thesis

Wood's thesis may be reduced to five main points, which are discussed in
this section and the next. First, New Zealand had been at least as
closely involved in moves towards federation as the other colonies between 1883
and 1891, before the premiership of Seddon. Therefore, secondly, the absence of
involvement in 1899-1900 could be explained "in the odd phenomenon which
New Zealanders call King Dick". Thirdly, arguments against federation were
exaggerated, "plain nonsense" and "emotional fluff" which
might easily have been routed. Fourthly, by 1900 there was "a considerable
movement in favour of New
Zealand joining in". Although "its
strength is hard to assess", a "strong lead in favour of some form of
close association would have found a vigorous response". Fifthly and more
generally, the issue in New Zealand
should be assessed in Australasian terms: "it is hard to think of any
solid argument which tended to keep New Zealand out which was not
equally applicable to some at least of the federating colonies."1
This was an exhilarating assault, but it can be suggested that each of the five
points was exaggerated.

"Wood's thesis ignores the fact that New Zealand
had always been the least active and the most reluctant participant in
federation movements before Seddon's ascendancy."2 In fact,
Wood's evidence for a constructive contribution extends little beyond a
complimentary allusion by the premier of
Victoria, James Service, to the supportive role of the New Zealand delegates to the
intercolonial convention of 1883. Wood did not mention that Service also made
it clear that he was mightily relieved:

I had a little misgiving ... in case New
Zealand should hold off from the grand union and
endeavour to do that which I felt would have been a mistake, namely, to form a
sort of Pacific dominion with New
Zealand at the head of it, and thus have two
dominions in those seas.3

By 1885, Service's fears were on
the way to realisation. Indeed,, Australian politicians gave up on New Zealand
at a very early stage. Deakin spoke in Dunedin
in 1889, calling for "a federal crusade". In 1891, he likened New
Zealand to "a coy maiden, not unwilling, and indeed expecting to be
courted", but this most energetic of evangelists made no further efforts
to woo.4 New Zealanders, wrote Pember Reeves in 1902, "never
seriously contemplated coming in; nor have the Australians supposed that they
would, or expended much time or trouble in efforts to enlist them."5
When the New Zealand Royal Commissioners crossed to Australia in 1901, one Commonwealth
minister did not even know they were coming.6

A powerful case for New Zealand indifference to
federation was marshalled by Miles Fairburn in his response to Wood. One
politician complained that at the general election of 1884 it was
"difficult ... to get any attention to the subject at all", and the New Zealand Herald published just two
letters on the subject during a two-month period when the topic might have been
newsworthy. Stout assured parliament in 1884 that it would be
"unwise" to press the issue "if it be that public opinion in
this colony is not ripe for federation".7 When the subject came
up the following year, one newspaper described the debate as "a very
dreary fizzle", and Stout repeated his opinion that "it would be
unwise for this Parliament to press the people in the colony further than they
can go with us with their sympathy and support". A thin House of nine
members voted down the Federal Council of Australasia, but accepted resolutions
in favour of the federation of the British Empire
and of the English-speaking world.8 The New Zealand support for
federation gratefully hailed by Service had evaporated within two years. The
colony refused to adhere to the Federal Council, even though its ostensible
aims included opposition to the intrusion of other European powers into the
Pacific. The Federal Council was a toothless body, but even so Stout wished to
emasculate it still further.9 "Federation" before 1890
meant something much weaker than "federation" after 1890. If New
Zealanders strained at the confederal gnat, it is hard to agree with Wood's
assumption that they might have been persuaded to swallow the Commonwealth
camel. On the basis of Fairburn's argument, Sinclair concluded that "the
real decision not to join Australia"
was taken in the eighteen-eighties.10

Thus it is possible to read too much into the
fact that New Zealand
was represented at the federation negotiations of 1890 and 1891. There is
little evidence of any public interest before 1891. Indeed, one politician
complained about the cost of sending delegates at all. Even then, newspapers
described federation as an idea in the "debating society stage" and
one of the most prolific of newspaper correspondents on the subject was the
wife of an Auckland
professor, surely a double disadvantage for an opinion-former in a colonial
society. The governor, Lord Onslow, reported to London that nobody supported the scheme. For
the ministry, Pember Reeves deflected a question on the subject by pleading
that it would be "premature" to define their policy before the
scheduled debate on federation. This debate the ministers smartly arranged to
have counted-out.11 Overall, between 1883 and 1900, 66 speeches on
federation were delivered in the General Assembly. By the verbose standards of
colonial politics, this was something close to taciturnity. Of those 66
orations, 43 were anti-federal, and only four were uttered after 1890.12

From 1897 onwards, as the federation movement
reached its crescendo across the Tasman, New Zealand made no contribution at
all. Even Seddon's attempt in 1900 persuade the British government to safeguard
New Zealand's eventual right to join was last-minute, half-hearted and a
further revelation of innate New Zealand distrust of Australian fair play. Wood
made much of the way in which Seddon blocked discussion of the issue between
1899 and 1901.13 Surely of more significance is the fact that Seddon
was able to get away with a cynical policy of evasion: not even King Dick could
control the press and the hustings. Yet few witnesses who gave evidence to the
Royal Commission seemed troubled by Seddon's handling of the issue. "We
wrote to Mr. Seddon to get some information", reported the President of
the Industrial Association of Wellington, "but no notice was taken of our
letter, and we had no proper data."14 The most strident
denunciation came from Jesse King, an Auckland accountant, who condemned "the indolence of the
Government in keeping the people of this colony in ignorance of possibly the
greatest political movement in British history outside Great Britain
itself". He went on denounce New Zealanders themselves for a "narrow
provincial spirit that is doing so much damage to the most glorious cause ever
promoted in the Southern Hemisphere".15 Some causes, however
glorious, suffer as much from their friends as from their enemies.

"Plain
Nonsense" and Historical Methodology

The third element in Wood's
dismissal of the case against federation ("nine-tenths of it
nonsense") led Adrian Chan to make an important methodological point:

... it really does not matter
whether the claims of Captain Russell were valid or not. They might well be
plain nonsense. What may be more important is the influence of those claims and beliefs.1

Chan's reservation raises a major issue for historians who deal with the
near past. No serious scholar would waste time condemning seventeenth century
British societies for killing witches: it would be pointless to direct
modernistic moral outrage against people whose values and world picture were
entirely alien from our own. Yet the picture is less clear-cut in the transitional
zone of time before the contemporary era, when we encounter people who
discussed their futures in social and economic language that we can comprehend,
through democratic processes that survive to this day. What, then, are the
ground rules that would entitle historians to condemn New Zealand anti-federationists of
a century ago for talking "plain nonsense"?

Obviously, Chan was correct in arguing that past
opinions cannot simply be second-guessed by a scornful posterity. Yet for
historians simply to accept that all past opinions were equally valid would be
to abdicate any analytical role. We may begin with the reflection that
politicians were coalition-builders who sought to assemble majorities. In an
age of florid oratory, they were tempted to make use of arguments to gain
support. Only if individual politicians or their close allies can be detected
using diametrically opposed rhetoric in another context, can we reasonably
conclude that, somewhere along the line, we have encountered plain nonsense and
emotional fluff. By and large, New
Zealand politicians may be acquitted of
first-degree oratorical dishonesty. The most that can be said against them is
that they were inconsistent in their attitudes to distance when they denounced
the French in New Caledonia or dreamed of
annexing Fiji.2 It would be hard to convict any prominent New Zealand public figure of celebrating kinship
with Australia
at any time in the eighteen-nineties. Wood paid Seddon the back-handed
compliment that King Dick never allowed himself to be guided by "any
nonsense about consistency". Seddon had worked on the Victorian goldfields
and married an Australian bride. His political base was the West Coast of the
South Island, the area of New Zealand
most closely linked to Australia.
Seddon's emotional fluff about his adopted country may have been nonsense, but
it was remarkably consistent nonsense from a man who might have found it useful
at some stage in his varied career to have played up his Australasian
credentials.3

Thus we ought not to condemn 1900 on the basis of
the values of 1968 or 2001, and we must accept that even if anti-federationists
were fools, there is no evidence that they were hypocrites. The furthest we can
go in endorsing Wood's critique is to establish whether the arguments that he
condemned were also controverted at the time. Wood singled out four claims for
especial scorn. The first of these was Captain Russell's contention that the New Zealand environment was creating a distinct
national type ("plain nonsense ... there would no difficulty in
demolishing every one of his points"4), to which may be coupled
Ballance's "astonishing"5 belief that a united Australia would break away from the British Empire. Thirdly, suspicions that Australians
would be unable to prevent the occupation of their continent by non-white
people were dismissed as "an odd twist of New Zealand thinking".6
Fourthly, perhaps crucially, Wood challenged Sir John Hall's twelve hundred
arguments based on distance ("I can not [sic] see that the Tasman Sea - at
any rate at that time - was a
more serious obstacle than those separating the mainland colonies"7).

Captain Russell's belief that his experience of
clearing Hawkes Bay bush pointed to a unique New Zealand national type may well
have raised a smile in Melbourne in 1890. Evidence to the Royal Commission
rarely dwelt on physical environment. One Auckland
witness, a supporter of federation, went so far as to say that "if I was
dropped down here suddenly at night I could not tell the difference between
here and the southern parts of Australia".
On the other hand, a critic alleged that but for "the blessed absence of
Dutchmen in Australia, there is no more in common between us and the island
continent than there is between us and Cape Colony".8 As Belich
has pointed out, Australians themselves regarded the "Shaky Islands"
of New Zealand as alien terrain.9

Russell's appeal to environmental determinism is
probably best interpreted as part a wider theory of distinct identity. His
discreet remark that New Zealand
had "been colonized in an entirely different manner" suggests that
his appeal to the swinging of the axe was a coded reference to the rattling of
the chains. Captain Russell was by birth an English gentleman and a federal
convention in Australia's largest city was hardly the occasion to discuss the
origins of New Zealand's neighbour.10 There is plenty of evidence
that Australians remained sensitive about their convict origins,11
and it was in 1902 that New Zealanders were famously hailed as not simply "British"
but "best British". In any case, Russell was appealing not simply to
environmental factors, but to climate - a common theme in evidence to the Royal
Commission in 1901. Indeed, he picked up the point from a previous speaker,
Andrew Inglis Clark of Tasmania.12 True, Tasmanians were planning to
throw in their lot with mainland Australia,
but in their case environment and climate produced large crops of apples and
potatoes for the Melbourne
market.

Australian federation and republican secession
from the Empire had been connected ever since John Dunmore Lang had linked them
in his Freedom and Independence for the
Golden Lands of Australia,so
arousing the suspicions of Governor Gore Browne. The adoption in 1891 of the Cromwellian
style, "Commonwealth", was not auspicious.13 The Sydney Bulletin's prediction that the draft
Australian constitution of 1891 "will reproduce ... the scrofulous sores
of the Old World" is a reminder that it was not an unqualified supporter
of federation, but there can be no doubting its strident nationalism, nor its
enormous influence.14 The Reverend George Macmurray of Auckland's
Anglican Cathedral even made the unappealing suggestion that New Zealand should
join the Australian Commonwealth in order to resist republican pressures.15 Even nonsense comes in gradations, and
suspicions of a republican Australia were not entirely lacking in foundation.

Appealing to the celebrated aphorism of Deakin,
Wood insisted that the one certain result of federation in Australia was the determination to
exclude non-white people. Only "ignorance", he suggested, could
explain the fact that some New Zealanders perversely feared that their
neighbours would be forced to accept Asian labour in the tropical North.16
There were undoubtedly some odd exchanges in the evidence given to the Royal
Commission. The New Zealand-born Irish Catholic, P.J. O'Regan, declined to give
an opinion on whether Anglo-Saxons could perform physical labour in northern Australia since
he was not one himself. He thought it was "probable" but unimportant
that the "coloured races" would settle in Australia. "We do not object
to buying bananas from Fiji."17
Other opinions were bizarre, but not necessarily uninformed. The Reverend
William Curzon-Siggers of Dunedin had lived in
north Queensland,
an experience that had persuaded him that European peoples declined under
tropical conditions. From this assumption he drew the happy conclusion that
"the mental characteristics of the people of Otago" would
out-distance those of the North Island.18 Such attitudes were
natural extensions of the belief that climate would create distinct national
types, and it was by no means illogical to assume that northern Australia was
destined to be occupied by people more accustomed to blazing heat. The achievements of Abraham Lincoln in the
field of race relations seemed to have eluded the Rangitikei farmer, Robert
Simpson, but his argument was more coherent than Wood's dismissal allows.
"The Americans started by importing a few slaves, and now they have eight
millions". Australia
would similarly find it impossible "to do without coloured labour in
one-half [of] her territory. They will find the force of circumstances too much
for them .... we have a compact population of Europeans here and we should keep
it so."19 On the face of it, we seem to be left with a paradox:
Australians were assured that joining federation was the best way for them to
remain white; New Zealanders that remaining aloof would enable them to resist
the undermining of their pigmentation.

"I think I mentioned that the intervening
sea constituted twelve hundred reasons against New Zealand joining", Sir
John Hall recalled when asked by the Commissioners to describe his attitude in
1890.20 As with environment
and climate, this "weighty argument"21 should be seen in
part as an outward projection, in this case of New Zealand localism. Arguably
this factor distinguished New Zealand from most of the Australian colonies:
there was a good chance that areas such as the Murray valley that felt remote
and alienated from colonial capitals would gain through the elimination of
artificial boundaries, an incentive that could not operate in Southland or
Nelson.22 Moreover, in New Zealand, unlike Australia, localism had
been built into the structure of colonial government through the quasi-federal
provincial system that had operated from 1852 until 1876. New Zealanders had
begun to define their responses to the larger issue of Australasian federation
within a few years of the abolition of the provinces, and some transferred
their nostalgic resentment. Gerald Peacock, editor of the New Zealand Farmer, also warned that the Commonwealth would become
more "than a mere Federal bond. It is likely to prove a strong
amalgamating force, welding together the different provinces of Australia into
one homogeneous political whole". Except in South Australia, the term
"province" was rarely applied across the Tasman. The message was
subtle but it was clear.23

Fear of Australia expressed itself in
humbling parallels. Faced with federationist sentiment from T.W. Hislop, who
had served in the Atkinson ministry, the Commissioners asked him if the Chatham
Islands suffered because of their distance from New Zealand. Hislop replied that
the Chathams were visited once every two months,
had no cable connection and that there were "some districts in New Zealand quite as neglected".24 To compare New
Zealand with the Chatham Islands
suggests a degree of insecurity. Peter Cheal, an Auckland mining engineer, saw the federation
issue in terms of inter-island relations:

For many years the majority of
members in the New Zealand House were from the South Island, with the result
that they got two millions and a half more spent on railways than was spent in
the North Island, and last year twice as much was allocated to the South Island
as was allocated to the North, in spite of the fact that their trunk lines are
finished and ours are not. If we go to Australia we will be in the same
position.25

Barton's stirring vision of a continent for a nation was unlikely to
appeal to an Aucklander who feared the political might of the South
Island.

Even those who challenged the argument of
distance might highlight the assumptions behind it, as one Auckland merchant
unwittingly revealed when he claimed that his company could ship goods to
Sydney "cheaper than we can send them to Nelson".26
Commenting on the twelve hundred miles of sea, Albert Kaye, a Christchurch
merchant, professed himself "exceedingly surprised so much has been made
of it. I consider it a means of increasing communication rather than a means of
destroying communication."27 Other witnesses confirmed that the
distance argument did not go unchallenged.28 Some drew favourable
parallels with Prince Edward Island's membership of the Canadian Confederation,
or painted a bleak picture of unprogressive Newfoundland's insistence on
staying separate.29 "We are closer to Sydney than the western
states are to Washington," remarked another.30

Yet distance was more than a simple parrot cry. There
were historical precedents for regarding it as an innate problem.

The Irish Channel separates by
sixty miles Ireland from England, and it
has been sufficient for centuries to keep alive the distinct feelings of the
two countries. How can we, then, expect New
Zealand and Australia to work together with
twelve hundred miles of ocean rolling between them?31

The twelve hundred miles acquired
a curious technical precision. The Reverend George Macmurray was sure that if
"New Zealand
lay a hundred miles off the Australian coast federation would be carried by an
overwhelming majority". Equally, he suggested, "if New Zealand were
twice as far away as she is there would be no question of federation at
all".32 Pember Reeves may have had the same calibration in mind
when he noted that "New Zealand lay a thousand miles too far away from
Sydney".33

Two further points should be noted. First, even
if it could be proved that the "twelve hundred impediments" did not
constitute an absolute barrier, this would still fall short of converting them
into a positive argument in favour of joining an Australian federation. The
Royal Commission might indeed have exaggerated in predicting that "great
inconvenience must at all time be experienced in the administration of the
several departments controlled by the Federal Government". However, even
if they were wrong, it would not follow that it would be positively beneficial
for New Zealanders to be governed from a country four days' steamship journey
away. Even Wood accepted that distance was a "serious matter".34
Secondly, wlthough a secondary centre such as Nelson might lose out, it seems
reasonable to assume that New Zealand merchant shipping was better equipped to
handle coastal trade than to venture out on the storm-tossed Tasman.35
Internal coastwise distance had been a factor in the campaign that had deprived
Auckland of the seat of government in the eighteen-sixties. External, oceanic
distance was of a different, and more serious, order. Of course, we should not
make too much of the argument, since so much of New Zealand's export trade was
sent half-way around the world. None the less, that most useful of standard
reference books, Whitaker's Almanack,
felt it sufficient to explain to British readers that New Zealand would remain
"aloof" from the Commonwealth "on account of its distance from
the continent".36

Hidden Federal Sentiment?

How strong was New
Zealand support for federation? Wood
referred to the existence of branches of the Federation League in Auckland and Christchurch
in 1899, when the Wellington
Evening Post championed participation
in the Commonwealth. Sinclair went further, suggesting that Reeves and Seddon
were surprised by the "noisy agitation" in favour of federation.
Another Wellington newspaper conducted a survey of the opinion of 70 Members of
the House of Representatives, and found that no fewer than 20 supported union
with Australia, narrowly outnumbering the 19 who were opposed, but with 25
undecided.1 Against this, it has to be noted that there is no
evidence that federationists made themselves heard during the 1899 election,
and that Sinclair himself could trace only four parliamentary speeches on the
subject during 1899-1900, only one of which was favourable. Except for a
reference to a branch of the Federation League in Auckland, there is no sign
that any organised movement for federation still existed when the Royal
Commission heard submissions between January and March 1901.2

Basic to any assessment of that evidence is the
point with which the Commissioners began their own Report: "the question
had been but little considered by the people of New Zealand".3 The low level of public interest enabled
groups determined to block change to
play a disproportionate role as lobbyists: employer and union spokesmen for the
tiny boot and shoe industry were exceptionally active.4 Furthermore,
a natural corollary of ignorance was caution. "I do not know that I can
give an opinion of very great value," remarked G.G. Stead. Stead managed
none the less to provide several pages of evidence, but the disclaimer was odd
from the proprietor of the Christchurch
Press. Similarly, the publisher
George Whitcombe thought federation "a very difficult and complex
question" while another critic, Christchurch mayor William Reece, admitted
that he had "not devoted special study" to the issue.5 The
outgoing President of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce reported that federation
"came up incidentally more than once or twice" at their
meetings, "but was never thoroughly
discussed". His opposite number in Wellington stated that members
"were very much divided on the question".6 With respected
veterans such as Hall and Scobie Mackenzie firm in their opposition, it is
hardly surprising that apathetic doubt proved a poor spawning ground for a
vigorous federal campaign.

A clear majority of the 186 submissions to the
Royal Commission argued against federation. Sinclair classified 49 witnesses as
supporters, and a further 23 as non-committal.7 With the exception of a handful of
representatives of North Island farming organisations, those sympathetic to
federation made no effort even to cross-reference their evidence, and there is
no sign at all of any organised political movement among them. Witnesses favourable to federation may be
loosely classified into four groups: the cautious, the enthusiasts and the
eccentrics (two interrelated categories) and the farmers. Farmers are placed
last in the list not to denigrate the agricultural interest, but because an
assessment of their opinions leads naturally into consideration of Wood's final
theme, the shared Australasian identity of New Zealand.

"I was very sorry to be asked to give
evidence", complained the Aucklander J.H. Upton, but "if I had to
give a vote I would vote in favour." Several witnesses shared his hesitant
approach to federation. Matthew Kirkbride, a Mangere farmer, emphasised the
need to keep open Australian markets, but added "I am not advocating that
we rush into it". On second thoughts, he wrote to the Commission
retracting his statement in favour of membership. Speaking for the Franklin
Agricultural Association, James Rutherford agreed that nothing was to be gained
"by immediate federation".8 Such sentiments were probably
a tribute to the skill of Seddon's timing, which had ensured that the Royal
Commission went into action immediately after the proclamation of the
Australian Commonwealth but before the first session of its Parliament. "I
think we ought to wait several years and see the outcome of it in Australia", advised a former Member of the
House of Representatives, the Wellington
merchant John Duthie. From Featherston, the veteran politician Charles Pharazyn
offered the one-word advice "Wait".9 Thus even those
who supported federation in principle
did not necessarily feel sufficiently certain to demand immediate action. A Christchurch witness,
G.T. Booth, thought it in "the natural order of things ... inevitable and
irresistible" but added that his opinion was "worth but very
little" and that he was waiting for the Royal Commission to report. Under
questioning, he agreed that "if we cannot make a bargain that will pay us
we had better stay out".10 More informed but still ambiguous
assessments came from two sons of the lawyer H.S. Chapman, both of whom
destined to make an impact in their father's profession. For Martin Chapman,
federation had "been in my mind, I think, almost as long as I have thought
about any subject. We used to talk about it as boys at school." Despite
his enthusiasm, he did not believe that "New Zealand should consent to go in
as an inferior state". His brother, F.R. Chapman, supported federation in
principle but disliked the Commonwealth constitution.11

Such cautious support offered an unlikely basis
for a brushfire movement in favour of joining Australia. By contrast, some of the
enthusiasts were so eccentric that they seem to have been a positive liability.
True, a handful of witnesses felt able to present a cogent and detailed case
that New Zealand
would flourish under the Commonwealth constitution. The Auckland solicitor, Edward Burton, sought to
counter fears of Australian dominance by pointing out that every unit within a
federation sacrificed some of its independence. He had recently met Australia's
first prime minister, Edmund Barton, who had assured him that no Commonwealth
cabinet "would set about wrecking itself by making an enemy of a whole
colony".12 Another witness who had actually studied the new
constitution was P.J. O'Regan, a young man who already had a notable career
behind him. In 1893, at the age of 24, he had been elected to the House of
Representatives for the West Coast constituency of Inangahua, moving in 1896 to
nearby Buller - the
two districts of New Zealand
with the highest proportion of Australian-born residents. After losing his seat
in 1899, he had set out on a new career, enrolling at Victoria University
College to study law. A
committed Irish Home Ruler, he rejected both the argument of distance and the
British-Irish analogy "because the so-called Union
is no federation". According to his interpretation of the new Australian
constitution, only 7 of the 110 pieces of legislation passed by the New Zealand
parliament in 1900 would have fallen under Commonwealth control. None the less,
even O'Regan's support for New
Zealand participation was conditional upon
securing constitutional amendments.13

Other enthusiasts were short on tact. The Dunedin journalist Mark
Cohen was a veteran campaigner for assorted causes, dismissed by some as a
"faddist". He bluntly informed the Commission that New Zealanders
were living in a fools' paradise if they thought they good secure generous
trade terms from Australia, although he seemed a little inconsistent in his
equally forceful assurance that Australians would welcome New Zealand into
their federation.14 Thomas Dineen, a Council member of the Auckland
branch of the Australasian Federation League, argued that New Zealand would be
£60,000 a year better off as an Australian State. This conflicted with the
Commission's estimate that the colony would lose £450,000 annually. He also
denied that New Zealanders were superior to Australians and "as regards
morality, I have seen worse doings here than ever I have seen in Sydney or
Perth, which are the two worst cities in the Commonwealth".15
His combination of optimistic arithmetic and
tactless honesty was unlikely to win friends to his cause.

Some federal enthusiasts made light of problems
that undoubtedly concerned their fellow New Zealanders. Albert Kaye accepted
that federation was "a kind of unknown quantity" which might
undermine the favourable conditions enjoyed by New Zealand workers but "in
about ten years they would have adjusted themselves". "I really do
not understand the Commonwealth Act," said William Crabtree, a Wellington engineer,
"but I am prepared to go in, all fair and equal." The Commissioners
put to him "the sentimental question of sacrificing our independence: do
you attach any importance to that?" "None whatever", he
replied. W.J. Harker, a retired Auckland merchant, felt
entitled to be outspoken because his "bread and cheese" came from
investments in British government stocks. "A dozen smart businessmen from
the other side, backed by Melbourne and Sydney money", would
"revolutionise" slumbering Auckland.
A canal linking Manukau and Waitemata
Harbours would create
"one of the great waterways of the world" and help the city to
industrialise. He then declared himself an opponent of factory life because it
caused human degeneracy.16 The Commissioners did not question him.
They did, however, wonder why those who insisted New Zealand industry manufacturers
could compete in Australian markets were not themselves involved in
manufacturing. "An onlooker at the game of cards knows how to play the
game better than an individual player whose attention is concentrated on his
hand," was the patronising response of Auckland accountant, Jesse King.17

Overall, support for federation among farmers was
scattered and confined to marginal interest groups. Perhaps partly because the
Royal Commission held sessions in the cities (although it did begin in
Invercargill) and summoned witnesses in consultation with Chambers of Commerce,
few farmers gave evidence. Such support for federation as existed in the
agricultural sector was voiced indirectly and usually impressionistically by
urban spokesmen. A flour miller "was quite satisfied that nine-tenths of
our Southland farmers would vote in favour". A Christchurch merchant, James Gould, predicted
that "an enormous number of small settlers ... would be ruined" if a
tariff wall closed off Australian markets for potatoes and onions. "We
have not got the population to eat one-hundredth part of what we grow,"
warned a Cambridge
solicitor, W.F. Buckland, on behalf of the Waikato Farmers' Association:
"nineteen out of every twenty Farmers' Clubs are very strong
federationists". The Auckland
Agricultural and Pastoral Association was represented by a manufacturer of
chemical fertilisers, who reported that lack of time had prevented them from
discussing the subject. He claimed that Auckland
farmers supported federation and feared the effects of the extension of Victoria's tariff on
existing markets in free-trading New South Wales.18

The federal cause was hardly helped by the fact
that the key crop pointing to closer links with Australia was oats. It was a crop
that suffered from Dr Johnson's definition of it as a foodstuff that in England was fed to horses and in Scotland to
people. In dismissing federation in 1891, Ballance had scornfully bracketed the
export of oats with the loss of New
Zealand independence. In 1901, Scobie
Mackenzie was "unable to imagine any New Zealander outside of a lunatic
asylum" wishing to abandon the right of self-government to get "a
better price for our oats".19 In fact, there was some doubt
about the importance of the despised crop. It was claimed that a quarter of
Southland farmers did not even grow oats, and as for political mobilisation,
farmers were "very slow to move". Elsewhere, the crop was even less
important: the annual profit to Canterbury
farmers on oats exported through Lyttelton was reckoned at £5,500. This was a
little over one percent of the Royal Commission's estimate of the cost to New Zealand of
joining the Commonwealth.20

The arguments of special
interest groups among the farmers tended to be undercut by that "article
of faith among otherwise sensible New Zealanders", a belief in a
fundamental difference in the climate of their islands. "The only
agricultural products of any importance which New Zealand can supply to
Australia are oats, maize, potatoes and dairy produce," explained the
editor of the New Zealand Farmer,
adding that even without a tariff barrier, "there would only be a market
at exceptional periods of scarcity through drought or floods".21
Thus even if oats represented big business, it was not necessarily a federal
issue. As Fairburn demonstrated, there had been a shift towards the cultivation
of oats in late nineteenth-century New Zealand, from 6.9 million acres
in 1881 to 10.2 million by 1895. This was almost exactly matched by a decline
in the cultivation of wheat and barley, from 8.6 to 4.6 million acres. It seems
likely that this was primarily a by-product of the massive re-orientation of
the New Zealand
economy caused by refrigeration. Meat exports to Britain
rose from just under £20,000 by value in 1880 to £1.3 million in 1895; in the
latter year Australia took a
mere £8,732 worth of New
Zealand meat. That same year, butter and
cheese exports to Australia
amounted to £14,000 by value, but were twenty-five times greater to Britain. If
there was a boom in oats, it was grown to feed animals not Australians. Hence
Donald Reid, a voice from the eighteen-seventies, dismissed oats as "a
transitory and fleeting argument".22

An
Australasian World?

If improved communications and common challenges were creating a shared
Australian identity, then we might equally expect to trace the parallel
development of a sense of Australasian community. Rollo Arnold attempted to
assess trans-Tasman contacts in terms of personal mobility and the circulation
of newspapers. These are areas in which mere statistical measurements are hard
to interpret. Passenger movements may understate the true extent of mobility
between the two countries, while the fact that the Australian-born were thin on
New Zealand ground cannot take account of unknown numbers of British-born who
had passed through Australia.1 In any case, familiarity does not
always lead to understanding. Australian migrant workers were not always
popular in New Zealand; New Zealand shearers sometimes crossed to Australia as
strike-breakers. Most notable, of course, had been the impact of the 1890
Maritime Strike. New Zealand
workers had broken off formal links with Australian unions after becoming
entangled in a disastrous and largely external dispute. Hence the paradox that
historians should have concluded that in Australia
conservative interests saw the need to draw together, whereas in New Zealand both sides of industry wanted the
colony to keep the two countries apart.2 Even those witnesses before
the Royal Commission who had lived in Australia were divided on the
merits of closer political union. Australian newspapers and magazines
circulated widely in New Zealand,
although postal statistics suggest that their popularity was growing more
slowly than that of periodicals from Britain. But what did such
familiarity breed? What was the effect of exposure to the strident Australian
nationalism of the Bulletin and its
assumption that there was something different about "Maoriland"?3

In
one area that can be easily measured, intercolonial trade, Fairburn
demonstrated that New
Zealand was the least
"Australasian" of the seven colonies. Taking the years 1896 to 1898, Tasmania sent four-fifths of its exports to the other
colonies and Queensland
three-fifths. Just under half the exports from Western
Australia and South
Australia were directed within the region. For New South Wales and Victoria,
Australasia accounted for about one-third of
their external markets. By contrast, only one-seventh of New Zealand
exports crossed the Tasman.4

To
take full account of Wood's claim that "the factors operating in New
Zealand for or against federation were felt also to a greater or lesser extent
in most or all of the other colonies"5 would be to range deep
into unresolved debates in the history of all six Australian colonies. None the
less, it is worth making some attempt to look at specific comparisons, if only to break away from the overarching
categorisations that tempt us to look at "Australia"
and "New Zealand",
categories that only emerged as a result of the process we are studying.
Aspects of the New Zealand
situation may be briefly compared with three of the Australian colonies: Tasmania, Western Australia
and Queensland.

Blainey analysed the Tasmanian vote at the 1898
federal referendum by dividing the tiny island into seven regions. Five of them
registered support at between 85 and 96 percent: these were either remote
mining areas dependent upon direct trade with Melbourne
for supplies or agricultural districts and north-coast ports which looked
across two hundred miles of sea to Victoria
for their markets. It was a Tasmanian orator who famously predicted that
federation would "found a great and glorious nation under the bright
Southern Cross" while guaranteeing "a market for both potatoes and
apples". The remaining two districts which were less enthusiastic arguably
resembled parts of New Zealand. There was a 35 percent "No" vote in Hobart, which, like Wellington,
was a small city made prosperous by the presence of government. In the grazing
districts of the Tasmanian Midlands and east coast, opposition rose as high as
48 percent, fuelled, Blainey argued, by fears of mainland competition.6

By contrast with Tasmania,
few parts of New Zealand
traded extensively with Australia.
The Royal Commission supplied figures for external trade in 1899 arranged by
provincial districts. Column A shows the percentage of the export trade of each
provincial district destined for Australia. Column B shows that
figure as a percentage of total New
Zealand exports to Australia.7

Province

Exports
to Australia
as % of Provincial Total

% of NZ Exports to Australia

Auckland

11.79

15.88

Hawkes Bay

1.49

0.90

Taranaki

9.37

2.64

Wellington

4.28

5.90

Canterbury

6.18

11.37

Marlborough

2.99

0.27

Nelson

50.11

3.31

Otago

34.20

46.76

Westland

61.95

12.97

NZ Total

13.95

100.00

At first sight, it might appear that Westland,
Nelson and Otago would have been as interested in federation as the north and
west of Tasmania.
However, in each case the value of their exports to Australia was swollen by gold. Gold
accounted for 96.05 percent of the Westland
total, 51.98 percent in the case of Otago (which, of course, included the
former Southland province) and 45.27 percent of Nelson's tiny external trade.
Apples and potatoes are perishable crops which Tasmanians urgently needed to
sell to the half a million hungry citizens of Melbourne.
New Zealand gold went
through Australia
for convenience, and could be sold anywhere in the world. Overall, gold
accounted for two fifths of New Zealand's export trade to Australia; timber and
oats each accounting for ten percent. Oats accounted for twenty percent of
Otago's trade to Australia,
or about two-fifths of the non-gold exports. Agricultural produce accounted for
just 1.48 percent of Auckland exports to Australia: no wonder spokesmen for Auckland farming
organisations seemed half-hearted in their support for federation.8

Comparison with Western Australia throws into relief other
explanatory elements, centring not so much upon economics as on demography.
Thanks to a gold rush in the interior, the population of the colony had
rocketed from a shade under 50,000 in 1891 to 184,000 ten years later. Many of
the newcomers were "T'othersiders" from the eastern colonies, who
largely accounted for massive goldfields majorities in favour of federation.9
By 1900, barely one New Zealander in twenty had been born in Australia, a
proportion that rose no higher than about one in nine even on the South Island
goldfields.10 In Western Australia,
both the goldfields and the older settled district around Albany showed
their resentment against the domination of Perth by demanding the right to
break away and form a separate colony. Such a threat would have been barely
credible coming from Nelson or Westland
and indeed it did not occur to anyone to make it.

Even after its gold rush population boom, Western Australia still lagged behind Tasmania in the census league. Its premier,
Sir John Forrest, had sounded a note reminiscent of New Zealand debate when he insisted
that he was "not a federationist on any terms", but he roundly told
the New Zealand Royal Commissioners that he did not believe there was any value
in retaining a separate voice in dealings with the British government. Two
hundred thousand people could never
expect the imperial authorities to take
their side against four million: "it would be of no use our trying to
stand against the Commonwealth; it would be too powerful for us". 10
How far Western Australia's continental
location mattered is hard to say: as
Barton sardonically remarked, the colony shared a land border with the
rest of Australia
"when she gets there". The prospect, although not the formal promise,
of a transcontinental railway played some part in the decision to join. Forrest
was revealing if hardly tactful when he told the Royal Commission that "Western Australia might
just as well be an island in the ocean if we have no means of
communication". Wood might have dismissed the argument as Nullabor Plain
nonsense: the railway was not completed until 1917 and a study of the Western
Australian secession movement of 1933-34 suggested that it did little to bring
Westralians either economically or psychologically closer to the eastern
States.11 If, so far as Western Australia is concerned, Wood was
right in arguing that the federation debate in New Zealand was not unique, it
certainly does not follow that New Zealanders made the wrong decision. Within a
year, Western Australians were pleading with the Commonwealth government to
locate a quasi-ambassador in Perth
to resolve the difficulties that were appearing, even during a five-year
transition period in which the State retained its own tariff.12

In some respects, the most
intriguing comparison is to be found in Queensland.13 The two
colonies lay in the middle reach of the population league table, with 700,000
people in New Zealand and
500,000 in Queensland.
Each had a potential for demographic growth of a kind of which Tasmanians and
Westralians could only dream. Queensland also
resembled New Zealand in
that immigrants from Britain
were disproportionately numerous and influential. If the perceived external
threat from French and German colonisation in the Pacific was indeed a driving
force behind the movement for federation, then it ought to have been felt most
sharply in these two colonies. Defence considerations might well have been
underlined by the fact that the two had also experienced the sharpest conflicts
with indigenous peoples. More to the point, if Queensland's vast desert interior is blotted
out of the picture, they shared a very similar geography. Both colonies were
narrow corridors of north-south settlement stretching through a huge swathe of
latitude, with concomitant potential for regional conflict. If some New
Zealanders dreamed of a return to their lost provincial system, at least in the
early stages of the federation movement, Queensland
responses were persistently complicated by outright demands for secession from
its northern and central districts. Each of these corridors of dissidence was
further complicated by the rise of a dominant city at one extremity. Here,
however, the internal balances were different. More than one Queenslander in
every five lived in Brisbane, but the
overwhelming dominance of Auckland
still lay in the future, with the northern metropolis claiming fewer than one
New Zealander in ten. In 1898, of Queensland
provincial towns, only Charters Towers contained more than 20,000 people, whereas the
four main New Zealand
cities were still in rough equilibrium. Yet if Rockhampton and Townsville gave
the impression that they were yapping at the heels of the capital, it should be
recalled that they formed part of a referendum coalition sufficient to overcome
the reluctance of Brisbane.
It is a reminder that if any major division of New Zealand had seriously
believed that its interests to be compatible with federation, that case could
and surely would have been backed by considerable electoral clout.

On the face of it, Queensland was a pace-setter at the 1891 Convention,
while New Zealand
behaved more like the ghost at the feast. It was during a short cruise on board
the Queensland
government's official yacht, the Lucinda,
that the first draft of a federal constitution was put together. One member of
the drafting committee pleaded that any shortcomings should be attributed to
sea- sickness, but Pember Reeves praised the document, suggesting that the
letter "d" could have been omitted from the name of the yacht. In an
age when even colonial politicians knew their classics, Reeves was making a
charming allusion to Lucina, the Roman Goddess of Light.14 However,
Bolton and Waterson have recently warned that the prominence in 1891 of two
Queenslanders, Griffith and Macrossan, may be misleading. These two intelligent
and influential individuals perhaps exercised a personal influence that
considerably exceeded any support for closer union in their own colony.15
By contrast, Sir George Grey and Captain Russell, the stand-offish New
Zealanders, undoubtedly discharged a democratic mandate.

It was certainly the case
that Queensland appeared to fall out of the
march towards political union after 1891 just as totally as did New Zealand.
Wood's wise injunction is especially applicable here: the true task of the
historian is not to account for New
Zealand exceptionalism but to explain why so
many Australians managed to overcome genuine doubts about the utility of
federation. Bolton and Waterson demonstrate that some back-bench politicians
continued to demand that Queensland
participate actively in the nation-building process. Too late to make any
difference to the process, the New Zealand Royal Commission encountered just a
few scattered voices regretting that the
colony had not even attempted to mould the federal structure to its needs. Queensland voted itself on to the bandwaggon late in the
day, in 1899; New Zealand
never formally confronted the choice at all. In the event, north and central Queensland saw
federation as a means of advancing its economic and political interests. No
region of New Zealand
responded in the same way. Perhaps it would be too much to conclude that
Capricornian beef packed a harder punch than Southland oats. But the Queensland comparison is
enough to warn against confusing commercial opportunity with geographical
proximity. Townsville was just as remote from Sydney
as was Auckland.
Perhaps if Christchurch and Dunedin
had disliked Auckland as much as Rockhampton and
Townsville distrusted Brisbane,
New Zealand
might have become the seventh State?

Reflections

When John Ballance dismissed the idea of linking the country's destiny to
Australia in 1891, he presented his conclusion as the outcome of logical
analysis: "from every point of view, the whole weight of argument is
against New Zealand entering into any Federation except a Federation with the
Mother-country".1 For historians seeking a rational explanation
of events, the main part of his statement is indeed reassuring, but the
subordinate clause gives pause for concern. If ever there was a scheme that
deserved to be condemned as impracticable, surely it was the notion of
converting the British empire into a super-State, creating a political union
that would link countries at opposite ends of the globe? If to Ballance, the
weight of argument pointed overwhelmingly against an Australasian grouping but
in favour of imperial federation, within which the southern colonies would be
subsumed, we may well be tempted to look more closely at the whole nature and
role of argument in political debate. Did the examples, the incentives, the
confident predictions and the devastating proofs truly represent reasons
leading to a conclusion - or
were they rather contributed as rationalisations to provide a smokescreen of
logic in support of a viewpoint adopted that had emerged from some other,
perhaps instinctive, process of prejudice and reaction?

Such a
conclusion would hugely simplify the historian's task. Contemporary debate
could be dismissed wholesale as ignorant blethering, leaving the field open for
the construction of explanatory
hypotheses derived from first principles of our own choice. It is a tempting
prospect, but one that ignores the two crucial methodological lessons to emerge
from the antipodean debate on Australian federation. The first is to be found
in Ron Norris's reply to Geoffrey Blainey: we cannot dismiss contemporary
expectations as implausible simply because they subsequently failed to come
about: "the question of what actually happened ...after federation is not
relevant".2 The second, closely related, is contained in Adrian
Chan's rebuke to Wood: "it really does not matter whether [contemporary
arguments] were valid or not. They might well be plain nonsense. What may be
more important is the influence of those claims and beliefs."3
In other words, historians must resist the temptation to identify the arguments
they endorse as causes, while rejecting those that do not fit our chosen
theories as evasions and excuses. As argued above, the problem is exacerbated
by the anarchic manner in which the late nineteenth-century moves in and out of
our contemporary focus. When we step back into the world of one hundred years
ago, at one moment we find colonial politicians debating commercial opportunity
in terms that resemble the political discourse of today. Then, suddenly, we
find them slipping into the mystifying vocabulary of imperial loyalty, or the
nauseating language of racial superiority. At the heart of historical analysis
lies the challenge of filtering out the transient to identify the significant.
It is never easy to respond to the cacophony of the past, and the task is made
harder by the incomprehension of a posterity that feels close enough to enter
into an apparently modern debate of a century ago that focused upon economics
and identity when the truth is that there has been an entire change in the
underlying values through which we evaluate the world.

We can at
least attempt some rule-of-thumb identification of the differences between New Zealand discourse and the federation debate
in different areas of Australia.
Perhaps the most obvious distinction between the two is to be found in the
economic arguments. For most New Zealanders, Australian markets were already of
relatively little importance. Even in the case of those commodities that found
outlets across the Tasman, most notably the humble oat, it seemed implausible - not
to us, but to them - to
claim that market share could be protected through political fusion. Thus the
virtual absence of economic incentives goes a long way towards explaining why
New Zealanders displayed so little interest in Australian federation.
Unfortunately, even this tentative deduction does not take us very far towards
answering the larger question, the challenge that Wood regarded as the
fundamental historical problem: why did Australians decide to unite among
themselves? There is nothing startling about the information that contiguous
jurisdictions conduct considerable amounts of cross-border and interdependent
trade. Much of Canada's
prosperity is based upon its exports to a single destination, the nearby United States, while for much of the twentieth
century the Republic of Ireland depended overwhelmingly upon the United Kingdom
as the market for its produce. In neither case did these intense and dominant
commercial ties trigger pressures for political integration, even though it
could be argued that there were other similarities of language and culture, not
to mention shared challenges of communications and borders, that might have
been capable of sustaining the argument for the natural unity of a continent or
an archipelago. Thus the probability that economics "explains" the
failure of federation in New
Zealand is not in itself enough to permit us
to conclude that the same set of motives is sufficient to account for its
success among Australians themselves.

New
Zealand was unmoved by two of the overarching arguments
often associated with the coming of federation in Australia. Notwithstanding the
vulnerability of their islands to possible attack from German and French
colonies in the Pacific, New Zealanders put their faith in the British Navy and
simply could not see how their equally exposed neighbours could protect them.
If the defence argument was neutral in its effect, the appeal to White
Australia was an own-goal. New Zealand Pakehas were determined to defend their
pigmentation, and many of them regarded Australia not as an external
rampart that would resist non-European immigration but as a Trojan horse condemned
by climate and economics to open its doors more widely. In relation to defence
and ethnicity, the New
Zealand comparison seems to endorse the
conclusions reached by Ron Norris. These were arguments that Australian
federalists found useful, to build coalitions of support, to place opponents on
the wrong foot, perhaps simply to pad out the rhetoric inherent in their
political discourse. They do not provide the basis of explanation for a major
event in Australia's
history, and they certainly cut no ice on the other side of the Tasman.

Helen Irving's intriguing attribution of
Australian federation to a "Utopian moment" in the country's history
is also difficult to transfer to a New Zealand context. If the
political expression of utopianism was to be found in a drive to re-design
society through government initiative, then New Zealand was surely in the
bravest of the southern hemisphere's brave new worlds. In 1900, a New South
Wales politician condemned New Zealand as "a regular hotbed of
experimental legislation", predicting that the colony would only survive
"disastrous" schemes such as old age pensions thanks to "its
butter and mutton, and to its bounteous rainfall".4 Economics
and climate, once again, figure in the explanation, but the fundamental mystery
remains. The utopian impulse was powerful in New Zealand, yet it found its
expression in social reform rather than through political federation.

In Australia, the coming of federation
has been associated with a sentiment loosely labelled as "nationalism".
The British observer, Richard Jebb, may be criticised for elevating the
stridence of local patriotism around the Empire into "colonial
nationalism", but he was firm in concluding that "a distinctive
national sentiment" was "remarkable for its absence" as New
Zealanders confronted the challenge of Australian federation at the end of the
eighteen-nineties.5 This, it would seem, hardly squares with the
tendency of critics of the federal project to assume that New Zealanders were
somehow different from their Australian fellow-colonists. By some point in the
twentieth century, the two societies had definitely diverged on their paths to
nationhood. Was there a causal relationship between the issue of federation and
the emergence of a New
Zealand national identity? If so, which way
round did the connection operate? Wood himself accepted that arguments for New Zealand
distinctiveness which he condemned for their absurdity when advanced in 1900
had acquired "a significant reality" twenty years later.6 Was
there some inconsistency here? By what process could "plain nonsense"
become the foundation for a distinct national identity? For Sinclair, "the
decision not to join the Australian federation" was a "decisive"
step in the "consciousness of nationality".7 Thus, by 1910,
New Zealand Methodists were demanding a separate conference, "so that they
might express themselves without
admixture of Australian ideas".8
The term "Australasian" became unpopular, while its replacement,
ANZAC, was for New Zealanders a nationalist emblem.9 In 1901, they
had vaguely discussed the possibility that the Royal Navy might one day lose
control of the seas, but had concluded that the event was not only unlikely but
made the prospect of defence from Australia even less credible. "Time enough
to federate when danger threatens", one Australian opponent had claimed.10
Yet when the crisis did come in 1941, the two countries turned not to
each other but to the United
States. In a thoughtful memorandum in
support of federation, a Wairarapa farmer, Coleman Phillips, had pointed out in
1901 that in many practical matters, such as postal services and quarantine,
New Zealanders were already federated with Australia.11 In the late
twentieth century, those unofficial links were strengthened by CER and greater
mobility across the Tasman. Phillips had not foreseen that his argument might
cut both ways: if New
Zealand could secure the benefits of federal
co-operation without political union, why change? There is something of a
chicken-and-egg conundrum here: was there already a distinct New Zealand
identity that explains the rejection of federation, or was it something that
emerged as a consequence of a decision to stay aloof which had been taken for
other reasons? At all events, there is enough here to make us doubt the
inevitability of federation among Australians themselves. If the
eighteen-nineties movement had failed, there is no built-in certainty that the
six colonies would have converged in some other form.

The issue of a distinct New Zealand
identity, and the timing of its origins, is inter-related with the question of
leadership by the political elite. "There was not one leader in New Zealand who steadily fought for federation
as Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin did in Australia."12
Sinclair's verdict is unassailable, but any attempt to understand why this
should have been so can be little more than speculative and circular. Were the
politicians discouraged by the lack of popular support, or was public apathy
the product of their conspiracy of
silence? The evidence, such as it is, points rather to the second hypothesis.
Both Wood and Sinclair suggested that some form of pro-federation sentiment
existed among New Zealanders. There is something impressive about Sinclair's
estimate that 49 out of 186 witnesses who gave evidence to the Royal Commission
were sympathetic to the idea, since there is little reason to suspect that the
exercise was designed to maximise expression of favourable opinions. Indeed,
the proportion might have been greater had more farmers been involved in the
exercise. Presumably these men were the equivalent of the group whom Deakin
identified as the bedrock of support for federation, "the young, the
imaginative, and those whose patriotism was Australian or Imperial".13
However, even though the potential groundswell may well have existed, it is
clear that the Royal Commission was hardly treated to a coherent exposition of
the case for New Zealand membership. New Zealand
suffered no shortage of "Imperial" patriotism, but its local version
was unable to accept Australasian federation as compatible with the unity of
the British empire. Half a century later, "Joey" Smallwood
capitalised on his credentials as a patriotic Newfoundlander to educate the
proud but stubborn people of his native island into accepting that union with
Canada was the best way to express their British identity - but
Newfoundland, as witnesses had assured the Royal Commission, had long been
teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.14 Wood is probably correct in
assuming that only Richard John Seddon could have led such a campaign in New
Zealand - but
Wood never explained why Seddon should wish to do so. When a group of Wellington manufacturers
wrote to him asking for information about federation, he did not even trouble
to reply. Bereft of political leadership, the assorted enthusiasts who hoped to
see New Zealand
as the Commonwealth's seventh State could be left to discredit their own dream
by the confused impracticality of their arguments. New Zealand, in Seddon's eyes, was God's
own country. When it came to the question of federation with Australia,
Seddon's God was evidently not on the side of the big battalions.

AFTERWORD AND AGENDA

There is no guarantee that further research will
solve the problem of explaining the contrasting Australian and New Zealand
responses to federation. None the less, there are some aspects of the subject
that might usefully be explored.

One
fruitful line of enquiry may be found by looking in more detail at the outcomes
of the various the referendums on federation held across Australia
between 1898 and 1900. In retrospect, it seems odd that there was so little
detailed analysis of these voting figures during the active phases of the
Parker-Blainey debate. However, past omission might open the way to more
revealing future enquiry, since computers make possible far more complex
cross-referencing between voting figures and other census data than would have
been possible three or four decades ago. Electorate by electorate, it ought to
be possible to see if there are patterns of voter response to federation that
might correlate with other classifications, such as place of birth or political
allegiance. Much of the argument over economic motives at local level has been
based upon impressionistic evidence. It is time to set the contents of the
ballot boxes alongside local statistics for sheep and cattle numbers, truck
farming, wine production and the output of sugar beet. Even if the results
prove to be opaque, we shall have learnt something about the effectiveness of
our own explanatory classifications.

On
the New Zealand side, there
may be a case for re-opening the hunt for the missing movement in favour of
closer links with Australia.
The Wellington Evening Post championed federation, and
other newspapers presumably reported and commented upon the progress of the
movement. Several witnesses told the Royal Commission of attempts to discuss
the issue in the organisations they represented. It is hard to believe that the
Commission's own Report went entirely unnoticed. It is always dangerous to
confuse column inches with public opinion, but it is likely that New Zealanders
had more to say, or that more was said to them, about federation than
historians have uncovered.

Some
comparative or integrative approaches might also be attempted. One section of
the evidence collected by the Royal Commission may be worth further scrutiny of
a kind that would extend the trans-Tasman framework of historical enquiry. The
New Zealand Royal Commissioners visited Sydney
to interview both members of the fledgling Commonwealth cabinet and New South Wales critics of federation. The responses gleaned,
at least from the former category, were comprehensive and carefully worded. In
1901, federation was an accomplished fact, but its controversial birth was so
recent that Barton and his colleagues were careful not to give hostages to
their own critics. Nor did it take much political insight to realise that the
Commissioners were acting as prosecuting counsel rather than as an unbiased jury.
None the less, this is a source that merits incorporation in some future
history of those times.

Political
history is at something of a discount nowadays, having given place to social
history agendas that have told us so much about race, class and gender. Perhaps
the comparative approach could ease it back into favour. This study has
attempted to compare Australia
and New Zealand.
Hence it is open to the objection of being built upon two categories that were
created by the process under review, thus allowing the outcome to define the
scope of the enquiry into its own causes. It is salutary to be reminded that
the eighteen-nineties thought of seven colonies (or even eight or nine if Fiji and
British New Guinea were included). Part II above attempts to sketch how
comparisons might be made between New Zealand and individual Australian
colonies, but these outlines most emphatically do not exhaust the story. Even
the classification "New
Zealand" may be unduly broad. Tasmania, for instance, resembles the South
Island in its mountainous topography and mixed pastoral and mining
economy. Both islands were a tale of two cities: was the Launceston-Hobart
relationship the same as that between Dunedin
and Christchurch?
Both were affected by the pull of northern neighbours. Tasmania
seems to have been generally content within the economic orbit of Victoria, but the South Island
was beginning to feel the dominance of its partner. In other respects, there
were sharp differences. Tasmanians had a guilty history of racial extermination;
South Islanders were by no means innocent of the charge of expropriation but
their society was not scarred by genocide. The two principal South Island
colonisation ventures, Otago and Canterbury,
made large claims for the excellence of their human stock. It is hardly
necessary to state that attitudes to the founding fathers and mothers of Tasmania were very
different. A comparison organised around responses to the common theme of
federation might unlock new and interesting perspectives upon those two
colonial societies.

More
research would be welcome and new findings are likely to be interesting in
their own right. Yet the fundamental problem remains with the methodology that
historians use to account for episodes in the past. We need to categorise
arguments more effectively, to distinguish between expressions of opinion
designed to mobilise support and the effusions of utterance that record the
muddled reactions of individuals trying to define their own ideas in the
absence of a coherent framework of public discourse. Much of the reported
discussion of federation in Australia
falls under the first heading. Politicians talked about defence or immigration
control not because these issues accounted for their own motivation but because
voters were naturally reluctant to contemplate that their colonies might be
invaded or overrun. By contrast, a good deal of the material collected by the
New Zealand Royal Commission came from people who were reluctantly forced to
translate gut reactions into a pastiche of intelligent analysis.

It should go without saying
that to point to a more positive form of Australian discourse is not to imply a
superior level of collective intelligence. The difference between the two types
of argument is to be explained by the way in which the political elite defined
federation as a practical topic on one side of the Tasman while their
counterparts had managed to keep it at arm's length on the other. This brings
us back to the central conundrum: by what process does an ideal become an
issue, an aspiration get translated into a policy? As it happens, political
elites do not operate collectively like soldiers on parade. Lyne and Nelson and
Want were just as prominent as Barton, Deakin and Forrest. While most moved
towards the federal light, Inglis Clark and Henry Bournes Higgins were prepared
to retreat into darkness. If leading politicians made their choices as
individuals, were they influenced by a public groundswell, or was popular
support for federation a by-product of the case for union that they marshalled
and disseminated? We come back to a central weakness in F.L.W. Wood's
revisionism: did Seddon decide to ignore federation because there was little
sign of viable public support, or was Seddon to be blamed for failing to give New
Zealanders a positive lead?

It
is difficult to separate the writing of national history from the attitudes of
historians to the countries they choose they study. In most cases, and the
present study is no exception, those perceptions are benign. Where the scholar
is also a citizen, the driving force is often a form of patriotism. When the
study is triggered by an anniversary, the motivation may also be celebratory.
For the leader writer for the Scotsman on
2 January 1901, the inauguration of the Australian Commonwealth
on the very first day of the twentieth century was symbolic of modernity. If Australia had
reached the end of one journey, it could surely look forward with still greater
hopes for the future. "May the
close of the Twentieth Century witness a fulfilment of these hopes beyond even
the brightest promise with which it opens!"One hundred years
later, there remains a sense in whichit is impossible to assess the
Australian (and New Zealand)
present without understanding the causes that set the two countries on distinct
paths and the agenda that those challenges created. Ultimately, that is a
problem of historical methodology, one that will not in itself be solved simply
by the amassing of new evidence. Did federation come about thanks to some amalgam
of the menaces and arguments showered by politicians and journalists, or was it
the product of a deeper culture and broader trends that operated almost beyond
human control? Without a solution to the issue of interpretation, it is
unlikely that historians will ever succeed in explaining satisfactorily why at
a precise moment in time, six Australian colonies joined in federation. At the
very least, we are entitled to insist that any theory seeking to account for
the Australian achievement must also comprehend the New Zealand failure.

ENDNOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

ADB:Australian Dictionary of Biography

Bennett: Scott
Bennett, ed., Federation (Melbourne, 1975)

CHBE
(Aust): J.Holland Rose, ed., Cambridge History of the British
Empire:

vol. 7, part 1: Australia
(Cambridge
1933)

CHBE
(NZ): J.Holland Rose, ed., Cambridge History
of the British Empire:

Scholefield: G.H.
Scholefield, ed., A Dictionary of New Zealand
Biography

(2 vols, Wellington, 1940)

Speeches
and Documents:

W.D. McIntyre
and W.J. Gardner, eds,

Speeches and Documents on New Zealand
History

(Oxford, 1971)

Wise, Bernhard R. Wise, The Making of the Australian
Commonwealth 1889-1900: A Stage in the
Growth of the British Empire (London,
1913)

New Zealand and Federation: A Case to Answer?

1. There was some revival of interest among
Australian politicians in the admission of New Zealand into federation around
1912. Rollo Arnold, "Some Australasian Aspects of New Zealand life,
1890-1913", NZJH, 4 (1970), pp.
54-76 [cited as Arnold, NZJH], esp.
p. 74. The requirement that constitutional amendments should win not simply the
support of a majority of voters but a majority of states would have made more
sense had New Zealand
become the seventh state. In 1999, a New Zealand cabinet minister, Sir
Douglas Brown, predicted that federation would "become a big issue"
again. An official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Wellington
commented: "I can't think of any New Zealander who wants to be part of Australia."
Daily Telegraph (London), 9 January 1999. The Canberra suburb of Manuka is locally
pronounced to rhyme with "Larnaka".

2. F.L.W. Wood, "Why did New Zealand not join the Australian Commonwealth
in 1900-1901?", NZJH, 2 (1968),
pp. 115-29 [cited as Wood, NZJH].

4. Clark, Documents,
pp. 477-479. Elsewhere Clark dismissed Russell
as "one of those maddening New Zealanders". Clark, History of Australia, vol. 5, p. 35. For
Russell, who was leader of the opposition from 1893 to 1905, see DNZB, ii: 1870-1900, R34, pp. 436-37.

5. Report
of the Royal Commission on Federation, in Appendix to the Journals of
the House of Representatives (1901), vol. 1. The Report is cited is RC and references to the evidence are
given by page (p.) and question (q.) number. The Report itself (pp. vii-xxiv)
is summarised in Speeches and Documents,
pp. 265-69. The Royal Commission was chaired by Albert Pitt, a political ally
from Nelson whom Seddon had appointed to the Legislative Council 1899
(Scholefield, ii, pp. 168-70). In addition to Russell, the Commissioners
included Harold Beauchamp, businessman, friend of Seddon and unloved father of
Katherine Mansfield (DNZB, ii, B4,
pp. 32-3); T.W. Leys, managing director of the company that owned the Auckland Star, who had declined a seat
in the upper house from both Ballance and Seddon and had represented the New
Zealand press at the Australian federal conventions of 1897 and 1898 (DNZB, ii, L11, p. 271); J.A. Millar, a
Dunedin trades unionist and MP who had earned much hatred during the 1890
Maritime Strike (DNZB, ii, M47, pp.
326-27), W.S. Reid, Solicitor-General under Vogel who was credited with having
drafted the bill to abolish the provinces (Scholefield, ii, p. 221); W.J.
Steward, an enthusiast for proportional representation with a long career in
north Otago and south Canterbury local politics (Scholefield, ii, pp. 332-33).
C.C. Bowen was a South Island counterpart of Captain Russell, a member of the Canterbury gentry whose
family had arrived shortly after the First Four Ships with a record of service
and promotion to the province (Scholefield, i, pp. 80-1).

6. A.J. Harrop, "New
Zealand and the Empire, 1852-1921", in J. Holland Rose, et al., CHBE (NZ), p. 205. The late Professor
J.A.W. Bennett, who studied at Auckland
University College
in the nineteen-twenties, told me that the Arts curriculum included a set text
listing the reasons why New Zealand
refused to join the Australian
Commonwealth.

12. Tapp, pp. 247, 249, 257; Quick and Garran, Annotated Constitution, pp. 228, 251; Speeches and Documents, p. 267.
Outsiders may have failed to appreciate the importance of location to New
Zealanders thanks to their own ignorance. Studying a map of the world in
preparation for the post-war settlement in October 1918 was a revelation for
the British prime minister, David Lloyd George. He was reported to be
"much interested in discovering New Zealand
lay eastward of Australia, he had always thought it was the other side!"
J. Barnes and D. Nicholson, eds, The Leo
Amery Diaries: i, 1896-1919 (London, 1980), p. 240.

16. Quoted, Tapp, p. 256. "If we were federated
with Australia there would
be no New Zealand
contingent," the New Zealand Times
had pointed out in October 1899. "It would simply be Australian."
Quoted, K. Sinclair, "New Zealand" in J.J. Eddy and D.M. Schreuder,
eds, The Rise of Colonial Nationalism
(Sydney, 1988), p. 126.

17. RC, pp. xv-xvi.

18. Speeches
and Documents, p. 267.

Enter F.L.W. Wood

1. According to legend, one flight carrying
Australian delegates arrived early in New Zealand
airspace and the pilot was put on a holding cruise around Mount
Cook. The proximity of the peak caused an awed silence in the
cabin, broken by the comment of a senior academic on the number of academic
posts that would fall vacant should the plane crash.

2. Wood, NZJH,
p. 116.

3. R.M. Crawford, "A Bit of a Rebel": The Life and Work of George Arnold Wood
(Sydney, 1975).
Father and son shared a number of characteristics, although the "Plain
Nonsense" controversy does not support G.A. Wood's verdict (p. 363) that
his son had "a wonderful gift for balancing pros and cons". A
colleague later related that F.L.W. Wood delighted in wearing down opponents in
historical debate by persistent rational argument. If victory was achieved, he
would sometimes switch sides and force the convert to respond to entirely new
arguments in favour of the position that had just been abandoned. P. Munz,
"A Personal Memoir" in P. Munz, ed., The Feel of Truth: Essays in New Zealand
and Pacific History (Wellington,
1969), p. 23.

4. His books included The Constitutional Development of Australia (1933) and A Concise History of Australia (1944),
both cheerfully dismissed as "juvenalia" in 1968 (Wood, p. 115). New Zealand in the World followed in
1940, and The New Zealand People at War
in 1958. A general interpretation began as This
New Zealand (1940) and passed through several versions, including Understanding New Zealand (1944). Wood gave a standard account of the coming of
federation in his Constitutional
Development of Australia, pp. 200-34. For a biographical note, see A.H.
McLintock, ed., An Encyclopaedia of New
Zealand (3 vols, Wellington,
1966), iii, p. 681.

5. Wood, NZJH,
p. 115.

6. R.S. Parker, "Australian Federation: the
Influence of Economic Interests and Political Pressures", Historical Studies Australia and New Zealand,
4 (1949), pp. 1-24; G. Blainey, "The Role of Economic Interests in
Australian Federation", ibid., 5
(1950), pp. 224-37, reprinted in HSSA,
pp.152-98. For other contributions to the debate, see HSSA., pp. 199-225 and Essays,
pp. 137-86. The Royal Commission had embraced a proto-Parkerian view "that
federation in Australia was
hastened by the constant friction and irritation" of artificial borders,
considerations that did not apply in New Zealand. RC, p. xxiii.

7. Wood, NZJH,
pp. 116-17. Overall, it is tempting to suggest that by 1968, Australian
historiography had got stuck in its own emotions. For many members of a
democratic profession, Australian nationality was the foundation of Australian
identity, the quintessential expression of which was the Australian Labor
Party. Thus it was difficult to face the implications of evidence that pointed
to federation as primarily the achievement of conservative forces determined to
control militant trades unions.

8. Wood, NZJH,
p. 116.

9. La Nauze, Deakin,
and cf. Wood, NZJH, p. 117. Al Gabay
has given us a different Deakin in The
Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin (Cambridge,
1992). By contrast, R.M. Burdon, King
Dick: A Biography of Richard John Seddon (Christchurch, 1955) may lack grandeur but
probably gives more rounded portrayal. The federation issue is discussed on pp.
220-23.

4. Sinclair, "New Zealand" in Eddy and
Schreuder, eds, Rise of Colonial
Nationalism, p. 115; Clark, History
of Australia, vol. 5, p. 72. Barton declined an invitation from supporters
of federation to speak in New
Zealand in 1899 (Keith Sinclair, "Why
New Zealanders are not Australians" in Sinclair, ed., Tasman Relations, p. 96.)

5. Reeves, State
Experiments, i, p. 148.

6. RC, p. 473 (R.E. O'Connor). Alfred Deakin was aware
that the Royal Commission had been established, but in January 1901 felt that
although the "possible adhesion" of New Zealand would have
"immense" effect on both sides of the Tasman, it was "little
regarded" by Australian leaders engrossed in the challenges of launching
their own Commonwealth. A. Deakin, Federated Australia:
Selections from Letters to the Morning Post 1900-1910 (ed. J.A. La Nauze, Melbourne, 1968), p. 23.

7. Fairburn, NZJH,
pp. 145, 147.

8. Fairburn, NZJH,
p. 147, and cf. Sinclair, Imperial
Federation.

9. Fairburn, NZJH,
p. 141.

10. Eddy and Schreuder, eds, Rise of Colonial Nationalism, p. 118. But Sinclair also observed
that "Fairburn's thesis led him to ignore the situation in 1899", Tasman Relations, p. 91.

11. Fairburn, NZJH,
pp. 146, 149.

12. Sinclair, ed., Tasman Relations, p. 94

13. Wood, NZJH,
pp. 125-28. In August 1899, Seddon had stated that "this question should
not disturb our elections", a contention only safe if he were confident
that federation would not be a prominent issue. A British official touring the
Dominions in 1913 reported that a "rather striking point" about New Zealand was
"the excellence of its newspapers compared with its size": there was quality
press competition in each of the main towns. The absence of a sustained
newspaper campaign in support of federation is all the more striking. Burdon, King Dick, p. 221; S.
Constantine, ed., Dominions
Diary: The Letters of E.J. Harding 1913-1916 (Halifax, UK, 1992), p. 113.

14. RC, p. 258/q. 94. An Auckland
merchant, A.J. Entrican, regretted that the government had not been represented
at the Federal Conventions that had framed the Commonwealth Bill, so missing
the opportunity of securing concessions similar to those won by Queensland and Western
Australia. RC,
pp. 454-56.

2. I draw here on discussion of similar issues in
Canadian history: Ged Martin, Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation
1837-1867 (Vancouver,
1995), pp. 32-5. In his articles for a London
newspaper, Alfred Deakin displayed ambiguity about distance. "It will be
difficult for those who are not accustomed to think of distances as we do to
realise in what proximity groups appear that are two or three thousand miles
away," he wrote in February 1901 of Australian interest in the Pacific. He
had earlier warned that "the vast distances" inside Australia would
impede the development of national institutions. Deakin, Federated Australia,
pp. 37, 8.

3. He is said to have based the street plan of
Kumara on the lay-out of Melbourne.
He did revisit Australia
shortly before his death in 1906, but his last public pronouncement was an
expression of relief that he was on his way back to "God's own
country". DNZB, ii, S11, pp.
447-51 (essay by the late David Hamer).

4. Wood, NZJH,
p. 123.

5. Wood, NZJH,
p. 121.

6. Wood, NZJH,
p. 124.

7. Wood, NZJH,
p. 123.

8. RC, p. 460/q. 2256 (T.B. Dineen); p. 471 (Gerald L.
Peacock).

9. James Belich, Making
Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End
of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland,
1996), p. 285.

10. Clark, Documents,
pp. 477-79; DNZB, ii, R34, pp.
326-27.

11. For an example, one of many, see the comment by
Wood's father on taking part in a project for a history of New South Wales in
1891: "we have all the great bosses here at our mercy - for fear we
sh[oul]d publish the crimes of their grandparents". Crawford, "A Bit of a Rebel", p. 120.

12. Keith Sinclair, A History of New
Zealand (Harmondsworth, 1959), p. 297.
However, the pervasiveness of assumptions based on climate could generate
varied hypotheses. While manufacturers feared for their future under
federation, a supporter of federation argued the reverse: "we have a
climate here favourable to hard work. For three months in Australia a man
engaged in labour has to be continually mopping his face and he loses thereby a
lot of time. That does not occur here." RC, p. 461/q. 2208 (T.B. Dineen).

13. Lang's book had been published in 1852. Deakin
acknowledged in 1901 that separatist feeling had been strong in the late
eighteen-eighties. In 1889, the New York Times
had drawn a similar conclusion from the removal of Queen Victoria's
image from New South Wales
postage stamps. In 1896, the Bulletin
wondered whether Australian republicanism was "quite as strong a sentiment
as it was ten years ago". Deakin, Federated
Australia, p.33; Crowley,
Documents, pp. 286, 486-87.

14. Quoted, Clark, History of Australia,
vol. 5, p. 75.

15. RC, p. 387/q. 810. Southern Rhodesian whites
similarly refused to vote themselves into the Union of South Africa in 1923
because they feared the eventual victory of Afrikaner nationalism in the Union. L.H. Gann, A
History of Southern Rhodesia: Early Days to
1934 (New York ed., 1969), p. 237.

18. RC, pp. 108-10, esp. q. 1884, also quoted Chan, NZJH, p. 194. Although a federalist,
T.B. Dineen, agreed that European women declined in tropical Australia: Queensland
women were "yellow" but their sisters in Victoria were "plump, rosy and
robust". RC, p. 461/q. 2213.
(Although permitted to vote, no women gave evidence to the Royal Commission.)

23. RC, p. 471. Recalling the fate of the provinces in
1901, Sir John Hall was sure that "the Central Parliament will gradually
absorb all legislative authority". RC,
p. 212/q. 1317. Edmund Barton later pointed out that the New Zealand
provinces had not been abolished by referendum. RC, p. 482.

24. RC, p. 328/q. 1389. Scholefield, i, pp. 392-93.

25. RC. p. 398/q. 1030.

26. RC, p. 456/q. 2168 (A.J. Entrican). The comment may
have been aimed at the chairman, Albert Pitt, who was a Nelson identity. For
the problems of Nelson, see M. McKinnon, ed., New Zealand Historical Atlas: Ku Papatuauku e Takato
Nei (Albany, NZ, 1997), Plate 52.

27. RC, p. 250/q. 2200.

28. E.g. RC,
p. 174/q. 424; p. 318/q. 1212.

29. RC, p. 318/q. 1211; p. 411/q. 1283; p. 328/q. 1389.

30. RC, p. 374/q. 530 (A.B. Donald, DNZB, ii, D11, p. 138).

31. From the Reverend John Andrew, Vice-Chancellor of
the University of New Zealand and a political relic of Provincial Council days,
came the information that Thucydides had offered a "strong argument"
for keeping Corfu separate from mainland Greece, although it was only fair to
add that Corfu had been united to Greece since 1864 but of course the two were
not twelve hundred miles apart. RC,
p. 358/q. 232; DNZB, ii, A8, pp. 6-7
stresses that he was unconventional.

35. Simon Ville, "The Coastal Trade of New
Zealand prior to World War One", NZJH,
27 (1993), pp. 75-89. Alexander Donald, an Auckland
shipowner, favoured federation partly because it would stimulate communications
with Australia:
"when you had large boats running backwards and forwards ... instead of
there being a few travellers, there would be thousands coming here". RC, p. 374/q. 533.

36. Whitaker's
Almanack, 1900, p. 496.

Hidden Federal Sentiment?

1. Sinclair, in Eddy and Schreuder, eds, Rise of Colonial Nationalism, p. 114.
Since Seddon's stock-in-trade included pride in his lack of formal education,
it may be unwise to build too much on his use of tenses. In 1899 he warned that
"when this colony did join we must see that the terms on which we joined
were such that those who came after us would not curse us for our action".
Burdon, King Dick, p. 221. Was the
door being left open - or slammed shut?

2. Sinclair, in Eddy and Schreuder, eds, Rise of Colonial Nationalism, p. 115. As
D.I. Wright demonstrated (Journal of the
Royal Australian Historical Society, 57, 1971, pp. 58-73), the Federation
League in New South Wales
was not notable for his activity.

3. Speeches
and Documents, p. 265.

4. Sinclair estimated that 100 of the 186 witnesses
were manufacturers or businessmen, 23 represented workers and only 17 were
farmers. Sinclair, ed., Tasman Relations,
p. 98. One pro-federation witness cited census figures to argue that out of a
282,932 "breadwinners", only 27,389 worked in the manufacturing
sector. He then excluded all those employed beyond the reach of Australia
competition in freezing works, sawmills, gasworks and the manufacture of butter
and cheese to argue that only 11,199 New Zealand jobs would be at risk. RC, pp. 463-64/q. 2265. Another
spokesman for the farming sector more bluntly denounced New Zealand
manufacturers as "spoon-fed". RC,
p. 438/q. 1657.

6. RC, p. 363/q. 344; p. 252/q.6. The Christchurch
Chamber of Commerce had appointed a committee to study the question. Sinclair,
ed., Tasman Relations, p. 96. An
occasional representative of the early settler families spoke favourably of
federation. E.B. Cargill was a supporter
in "a general way". Son of the famous Captain, he was claimed as the
original of the term "Old Identity". RC, p. 141/q. 2644; Scholefield, i, pp. 137-38).

12. RC, pp. 463-64/q. 2265. Enough detailed and
thoughtful evidence in favour of federation was put before the Royal Commission
to draw attention to the absence of a co-ordinated attempt to use the Royal
Commission as a platform for union with Australia. By contrast, an
aggressive campaign in favour of union with Canada ensured that the
Newfoundland National Convention of 1946-1948 spent no fewer than 34 full days
debating their case. "The opponents of Confederation must have been
asleep," their leader boasted. The opposite seems to have been the case in
New Zealand. R. Gwyn, Smallwood:
The Unlikely Revolutionary (Toronto,
1974 ed.), p. 93.

13. RC, pp. 313-22/qq. 1152, 1207, 1184. O'Regan's
support for federation with Australia
was consistent with his opposition to manifestations of nationalism (seen, for
example, in his disapproval of celebrations of the centenary of the 1798
uprisings) and his active support for Irish Home Rule. R.P. Davis, Irish Issues in New Zealand Politics (Dunedin, 1974), pp.
122-24 and cf. DNZB, iii, 06, pp.
374-75.

16. RC, p. 250/q. 2192; p. 305/qq. 979, 948; pp.
409-410/q. 1278. Seddon had formed a similar impression of the degeneration of
factory life and its unsuitability to New Zealand
during a visit to Belfast
in 1897. J. Drummond, The Life and Work
of Richard John Seddon (Christchurch,
1906), p. 309. Henry Overton, a Canterbury farmer, thought "federation would be a
grand thing for New Zealand"
because it would develop tourism. RC,
p. 237/qq. 1892, 1898.

17. RC, p. 420/q. 1429. Another witness patronisingly
attributed the short-sighted views of the industrialists to the fact they had
not travelled overseas and so were unable to form comparative opinions. RC, p. 412/qq. 1289-1291.

18. RC, p. 12/q.211; p. 197/q. 980; p. 438/q. 1657; pp.
442-449, esp. qq. 1877-1886, 1968. Franklin
farmers were concerned about the export of maize, but at Whangarei there were
fears that federation would destroy the vineyards which were the best hope for
Northland hillsides increasingly stripped bare of kauri timber. RC, pp. 453, 468.

6. Blainey, "The Role of Economic Interests in
Australian Federation", HSSA,
pp. 187-88.

7. Table compiled from RC, pp. 726-35.

8. Ibid. Even stagnant Nelson could take some comfort:
46.02 percent of its minuscule export trans-Tasman trade consisted of
hops. There were both climatic and
cultural reasons for assuming a continuing demand in Australia for hops.

9. J. Bastin, "Federation and Western
Australia" in HSSA, pp. 199-214,
suggests that there was no absolute correlation between newcomers and voting
support for federation, and it has been argued that "even without the
goldfields the proposal would probably have been accepted". F.K. Crowley, Australia's Western Third (London, 1960), p. 153. None the less, the
goldfields vote of thirteen-to-one in favour of federation, representing an
element that did not exist in New
Zealand.

7. Sinclair, History
of New Zealand,
226. The first edition of the Oxford
History of New Zealand (ed. W.H. Oliver, 1981) barely mentioned the issue.

8. Arnold, NZJH,
pp. 72-3. But an attempt to create better understanding by exchange of
Methodist ministers in 1888 had foundered when three of the four who were
nominated refused to shift.

9. M. Sharpe, "Anzac Day in New Zealand
1916-1939", NZJH, 15 (1981), pp.
97-114. As early as 1918, an Auckland clergyman
was calling the anniversary "one of the most potent things in the national
life of New Zealand",
ibid., p. 102. Australians
established a parallel and equally exclusive tradition.

10. The aphorism was associated with J.H. Want of New South Wales, who gave rumbustious evidence to the
Royal Commission when it crossed to Sydney.
RC, pp. 660-62. L.F. Crisp, Australian National Government
(Hawthorn, Vic., 1973 ed.), p. 4.

11. RC, pp. 446-47. As a leading campaigner against the
rabbit menace, Phillips was likely to have been aware of the benefits of
co-operation with Australia.
Scholefield, ii, pp. 165-66.

12. Sinclair, ed., Tasman Relations, p. 94.

13. Sinclair, ed., Tasman Relations, pp. 98-99. Tapp, p. 254, counted 50
pro-federation witnesses. The difference is to be attributed to confusion on
the part of the witnesses, not the historians.

14. Although a total contrast with Seddon in
physique, Smallwood also came to be known by his nickname ("Joey")
and established a similar command over local politics, but in his case after leading Newfoundland into Confederation. Islanders
had rejected union with Canada
in a raucous election back in 1869, a defeat that had virtually equated
Confederation with treason. Like Seddon in New
Zealand, Smallwood was known for his passionate
identification with Newfoundland:
without such a reputation, he would have found it hard to overcome the
unpatriotic connotations of his campaign. Self-government had been abandoned in
Newfoundland
during the Depression, replaced by a British-appointed Commission of Government
from 1934. Not only was Canada
an established entity, unlike Australia
in 1899-1901, but its government (and ruling Liberal Party) quietly helped
their Newfoundland
ally. Thus Smallwood was simultaneously able to mobilise considerable
campaigning resources (including, unusually in 1948, access to an aeroplane),
while portraying himself as the challenger to a local elite, symbolised by
"Water Street", the business district of the capital, St John's.
Perhaps his most effective weapon was the "baby bonus". Canada's
developing welfare state offered child endowment payments, and it seems that
the Confederation campaign used these to win the support of women voters,
especially as the payments were made direct to mothers and so offered a degree
of economic autonomy not usually available in a male-oriented society. It seems
clear, too, the British government tacitly supported Newfoundland's
union with Canada,
if only by refusing to assist the islanders financially or politically in the
re-establishment of self-government. The contrasts with New Zealand
half a century earlier are obvious. Both in politics and economics, New Zealand was
a success story, so much so that it was pioneering its own welfare system.
There was no single local political elite (other than the all-powerful Seddon
himself) against whom a campaign might have been mobilised. Federation leaders
in Australia
had their hands full in the attempt to corral six colonies into union, and made
no serious attempt to secure the seventh, while the British took little or no
role in the movement at all. All the same, the crucial referendum in July 1948
registered only a small majority of Newfoundlanders for union with Canada: 52.24
percent against 48.76. J.K. Hiller, "Confederation Defeated: The
Newfoundland Election of 1869" in J.K. Hiller and P. Neary, eds, Newfoundland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries: Essays in Interpretation (Toronto, 1980), pp. 67-94; P. Neary, Newfoundland in the North Atlantic World
1929-1949 (Kingston, 1988); D. MacKenzie, Inside the Atlantic Triangle: Canada and the Entrance of Newfoundland
into Confederation, 1939-1949 (Toronto, 1986); R.B. Blake, Canadians At Last: Canada Integrates
Newfoundland as a Province (Toronto, 1994), pp. 3-43. J.R. Smallwood's own memoirs were modestly
entitled I Chose Canada (Toronto, 1973).